Italy orders ISPs to block sites

Tue Mar 7 08:50:58 UTC 2006



--On March 7, 2006 1:35:05 PM +0530 Suresh Ramasubramanian 
<ops.lists at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 3/7/06, Owen DeLong <owen at delong.com> wrote:
>>
>> Singapore seems to force all of their ISPs to send all HTTP requests
>> through a proxy that has a set of rules defining sites you are not
>> allowed to visit.
>>
>
> As does (for example) the UAE, and China.  But not Italy.
>
> So this is quite moot, I expect.
>
> Also - having all local cable / broadband / dialup providers do
> something like this would cover the vast majority of internet users in
> the country .. not too many people or companies are going to be
> running their own resolvers, at least in a small country like Italy.
>
I guess that depends.  Afterall, all you need to run your own resolver
is a copy of bind and linux, macos, or windows to run it on. A caching
recursive resolver is pretty easy to set up.  If that becomes what it
takes to get around government regulations, I suspect gamblers who
really want to gamble will learn fairly quickly.

> The numbers are likely to be trivially small as compared to the number
> of people just using their ISP resolvers.  So a fake zone loaded into
> the resolvers redirecting these banned sites elsewhere should do just
> fine, I guess.
>
Today, true.  Tomorrow, depends on the motivation level of the affected
audience and the publication level of the trivial solution to the currently
prescribed method of control.

Owen

> --
> Suresh Ramasubramanian (ops.lists at gmail.com)